What should happen to these and what (if anything) should we be doing about it?

How is anyone going to benefit from a question like this, because to benefit you must have made the same mistake, you must have made that mistake in a directive and you must be using angular, and you must think that the problem is, it's not being added to the DOM.

UPDATE

The question mentioned in this post has been deleted for reasons of moderation, so I am including a image of the question & the answer so newcomers will know what type of question were talking about.

Question

Answer

Also If you asked that question, I'm not just picking on that question, because I have definitely seen worse, but it was at that point in which i decided to ask my first question on Meta

Pretty much nothing, just ignore them. They won't appear high in search results here or on google because of the low score and they don't really cost much money or time to have. CVing them might also be a fair suggestion.
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Benjamin GruenbaumSep 14 '13 at 15:55

It is not that simple. The value in a question like this is that somebody may find it back some day and realize that it might be a good idea to look for a typo as the reason that he's got the exact same problem. That isn't likely to be the exact same kind of typo. But enough to help him find his typo.
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Uphill LugeSep 14 '13 at 15:58

@UphillLuge Really? You'd think people would look for syntax errors in their code before asking the question on a Q&A site in general, or think they'd run it through one of the variety of tools that do so (a css or HTML validator in the example OP used)
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Benjamin GruenbaumSep 14 '13 at 16:02

9

Generally, for extremely bad syntax errors like this, I just flat-out delete them. No sense in letting them sit around the site.
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animuson♦Sep 14 '13 at 16:06

@animuson It's ok for you to say that, but from what I know, it's only moderators or Trusted Users that can delete questions, and as it stands, that would mean we would have to flag the question, and doing so you would be risking it every time and hoping that a moderator with the same views as you will receive it at the other end. By risking it I mean every likes to keep a clean slate and it's not going to be nice if your flag gets declined
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PinocchioSep 14 '13 at 20:20

1

@Pinocchio I have declined flags. Everyone gets them. Don't worry about a few declined flags. If you keep getting declined flags, then start worrying.
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George StockerSep 14 '13 at 23:53

Without knowing the rep of the user who posted the question above, I'd hesitate a guess that they were relatively new. By forcing revisions of such overly localized questions aggressively, I think it will help to educate new users who didn't/couldn't RTFM. We don't want to alienate future contributing users by brashly deleting their posts without some feedback on rephrasing, searching or self-debugging. Having a dialog with checklist requiring manual confirmation like "Ran code through debugging tool: YES, Searched for similar answer: YES" until a user has 50+ rep may reduce incidents.
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Leon StaffordSep 15 '13 at 2:52

I agree with this, but the incentives are just all wrong for this to happen in any meaningful way. People with programming problems of any sort are getting their questions answered and those answering the questions are getting the satisfaction of solving a problem, frequently a thank you for the person asking the question and they're getting reputation. The incentives for closing pale in comparison and involve a relatively long and unreliable process.
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Peter AlfvinSep 14 '13 at 20:14

@PeterAlfvin Agreed it is a long process and perhaps not the best solution, but there doesn't seem to be any better solutions arising.
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PinocchioSep 14 '13 at 20:18

4

Unfortunately, the incentives for generating innovative solutions on MSO are all screwed up as well. Instead of encouraging new ideas, including impractical, off-the-wall ideas that can be built on or that will trigger other ideas, we have a downvoting system and culture that discourages any ideas not in keeping with the status quo.
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Peter AlfvinSep 14 '13 at 20:23

@peteralfvin people getting their questions answered and people getting the satisfaction of solving a problem both seem like good things to me. I can't tell if you are saying this is a bad thing or not
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Michael PryorSep 14 '13 at 20:39

1

@MichaelPryor I think those are good things, the exceptions noted in this thread notwithstanding (e.g. Jon Skeet opportunity cost problem). However, I'm not sure leaving questions and answers around that don't have any reasonable chance of future value is necessarily a good thing or in keeping with the mission of the site, which as I understand it is primarily about building up a useful knowledge repository. So I wish we would have some discussion that would allow us to "have our cake and eat it too".
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Peter AlfvinSep 14 '13 at 20:46

-1 while I agree with some stuff you said, when I have to read a post about a syntax error I get annoyed. My time was wasted, as well as the time of the community in general. We're trying to make common programming problems easy to solve here. If Jon Skeet saw that question about a syntax error and that was part of his 15 minutes break for solving stuff on SO, this means someone with a real problem (which is not solved by opening the console) was robbed of a real answer. Syntax errors are very unlikely to help other users in the future.
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Benjamin GruenbaumSep 14 '13 at 15:54

7

You've got that moral authority part wrong. The SE network is a peer reviewed and peer maintained network, if enough people think that it's useless, then it's just useless.
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Octavian DamieanSep 14 '13 at 16:14